Get better bread when you make it ahead

Donna Currie is an author and food writer for Serious
Eats, Whisk Magazine, and the Left Hand Valley Courier, and other
food publications. She also has a blog, www.cookistry.com, where she writes about a
variety of subjects from bread to corned beef to cocktails. She has
just published her first cookbook, Make Ahead Bread. (Enter our contest for your chance to win a copy
of the book). Donna talked to us about how she got
into food writing and what led to Make Ahead Bread.

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I always knew that some fine day, I'd write a book and see it
published. Or I guess I dreamed it. Back when I was a kid, I
thought I'd write science fiction with space ships and lasers, or
fantasy fiction with sorceresses and dragons.

While I did get one short story published in a sword &
sorceress anthology many years ago, that was a one-time success. I
dabbled in other types of writing and my choice of genre took
several turns before I focused on food writing and recipe
development. Then, before I knew it, I was hip-deep in flour and
knee-deep in yeast, and I was writing a book about bread.

The concept behind Make Ahead Bread is that most folks
might not have time to make bread from start-to-finish in a single
day, and definitely not when they want sweet rolls for breakfast or
dinner rolls on a weeknight after work.

So I created recipes that are broken into prep days and baking
days. On baking day, it's generally just a matter of preheating the
oven and baking the bread. So, there's little to clean up, and not
much time spent before that bread is ready to eat.

The idea seems simple enough - just make a recipe, form the loaf,
and chuck it into the refrigerator. But it's not quite as easy as
that. The dough needs to rise just enough during refrigeration, and
many of the recipes I worked on rose too much or too little - so I
had to tweak the formulas to make them work.

The funny thing is that while these recipes are designed for the
long, cold overnight rise, most of them are just as happy to be
baked the same day. But the advantage of the cold, slow rise isn't
just about convenience or time-saving. Bread that has risen slowly
tastes better.

So, it's easier and it's better.

A lot of folks I've talked to imagine that writing a cookbook is
simply a matter of compiling a bunch of recipes and sending them to
a publisher to print them. I never imagined it would be quite that
easy, but there were a lot of details that I never considered, from
the order to work on recipes (not from front to back) to how recipe
are chosen for photos.

I did a few things wrong as far as my scheduling and processes.
Some things I figured out along the way. Like, there's only so much
room in the refrigerator, so I had to plan for that. And there was
that one day when I had one more batch of dough than I had loaf
pans.

Besides bread recipes, my book includes recipes for using leftover
bread, and that was one of the last bits I worked on. It wasn't the
best planning ever. When I was ready to work on that section, I
realized that I didn't actually have any bread in the house. I had
given the last loaves away. So … I had to bake more bread to make
the stratas and bread puddings and other recipes in the book.

Which was fine, really. It gave me a chance to make a few recipes
one last time, as the final check.

In the end, it all worked out, and I have to say that I was very
happy with the result. Now, I just have to wait to see if others
like the breads I created as much as I do.

3 Comments

I make all of my own bread now. Sourdough requires long, slow rises. So my normal pattern is to make the dough about 9-10 pm, knead it, leave in the fridge overnight, then shape and prove at room temperature in the morning. With a bit of luck I have fresh bread by lunchtime, and hands-on time isn't that much (half an hour tops).